About The Creative Organization

Educated at Harvard, and having spent over 25 years working with Fortune 500 companies both here and abroad, Intrator recognized the need for a new kind of education for companies hoping to succeed in the 21st century.

The curriculum would center around the ideas of creativity, communication and efficiency.

It would be informed by the practical experience and insights of creative professionals like himself.

Key among these insights is that creativity, communication and efficiency are all interrelated.

Creativity is the key to 21st century success.

It is widely recognized that creativity is essential to corporate success in the 21st century economy.

In his bestseller A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink argues that in an economy where non-creative tasks are performed more efficiently and less expensively by computers and low-cost labor, creative work is the one area where both individuals and corporations can distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Moreover, consultancies like McKinsey and Co., Deloitte and others have now developed practices to help corporations more efficiently create and innovate.

But misconceptions inhibit creative implementation.

The concept of creativity is riddled with misconceptions, foremost of which is that it is a solely right-brain activity, divorced from critical thinking, rigor and logic.

In the popular imagination creativity is something colorful and even wacky, reserved for special beings who “break the rules” and “think outside of the box.”

Creative pros understand what creativity really is.

Although intellectual flexibility and lack of inhibition are important components of creativity and innovation, creative professionals understand that left-brain skills that filter, structure and organize information are equally critical.

Creativity is efficiency.

Creative work, whether it’s writing a story, developing a brand or coding an app, is about efficiency and economy. All ideas that do not support a central concept or goal are edited out.

Creativity is critical thinking.

In order to organize information and ideas into an efficient and useful creative solution, logic and rigor
are paramount.

Creativity is decision-making.

At various stages of the creative process you’ll be faced with a plethora of ideas and routes forward. This can be paralyzing. The way out is to make a decision, however arbitrary, and discover where it takes you.

Creativity is problem-solving.

Creativity is about taking a mass of ideas and information and organizing it into an intelligible problem, which can then be answered in the form of one or multiple solutions. But is a unique kind of problem, in which there is no outside authority one can turn to justify the “correctness” of an answer. The definition of the problem and the criteria to judge its solution are all up to you.

Creativity is about results.

Creativity is not something that exists in the abstract. Rather, is an activity yields a product or service that works for people in the world. It is not merely a way of thinking, but a process by which we actually make things.

Creativity is learning.

Creativity is an iterative process in which we generate and organize ideas again and again, all the while discovering what it is we have before us, what it is we’re trying to solve, and what would constitute a successful solution. It is an act of endless learning and re-learning.

The Creative Organization is a learning organization.

21st century organizations need to be dynamic, flexible and open to change. They need to feel comfortable with ambiguity and be able to move ahead when no clear roadmap is available. They need to absorb, integrate and act on a perpetual flow of new information and ideas.